Playing in a LAN tournament is a great experience. No matter how bad the playing conditions or the organization, it leaves lasting memories and fills you with desire to become better.
And so the story begins:


It all started with the release of Warcraft 3. It was about the same time my parents bought a PC that could run the current games and so it all aligned perfectly for me to get hooked on the game. Me and my brother took turns playing against the AI or playing the campaign (and by taking turns I mean fought over it) since we had no internet connection. We found out about this 2v2 tournament at a place called aliensclub and decided to participate. I must have been 12 back then and was by far the youngest one there.

Prior to the tournament, we had no multiplayer experience. We would copy strategies from the AI and improve them. Our 2v2 training consisted of playing with an AI ally and imagining it was the other one of us. We quickly found out that ranged heroes had an easier time leveling up and building more than one hero would steal the exp away. We ended up playing orc and nightelf, choosing far seer and priestess of the moon. I had come to the genius conclusion that I should level up chain lightning at level 3 since by that time my grunt count would be high and the spirit wolves would only get stuck behind the grunts.

We quickly picked up on the slang. Things like the huntress being called a cat and the dryad - a cow were pretty common.
Even in the first round we noticed the opponents were using completely different strategies. While we were building unit production facilities first, they were getting an altar with one of the initial workers. Furthermore, they would tech up and get only caster units while we made grunts, archers and huntresses. As strange as it seems we won a couple of rounds and left our opponents puzzled. One of the games was epic - it was on Dark Wood, a 6 player map. The game had gotten pretty long and everyone else in the pc bang had finished theirs so they came by to watch us. My Far Seer was level 9 and my brother's Priestess was 10 but that didn't help that much since the opponents had mostly dryads (ultimates did not target spell immune units). We managed to use our ultimates to destroy their bases and won a 50 minute-ish game, feeling great sense of accomplishment. We did lose to some good players after that though.
The now legendary team of Insomnia and ZeeRaX ended up winning that
tournament.

The next part will cover how I got into broodwar and my loses to Technics
P.S. Sorry about the vague description of the games but I barely have any memory of them. I promise to improve that in the next entries.